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About this Course

Start with this very concise description.

The topics are listed in this page.

Exam and slides: see my personal website.

How to use this website

This website contains a curated set of references.

References provide real-world examples, in-depth analysis, technical manuals and the like. They are intended to be a resource for those interested in delving deeper.

Please always keep in mind that the content of this website is not needed for the exam: the slides are all that is needed in this respect.

Do not be frustrated

Many of the linked documents can only be fully understood with very specific technical skills (and sometimes theoretical knowledge) far beyond those required or provided by this course. Please try to focus on the topics relevant to the course. Most importantly, do not be frustrated if you do not manage to understand everything.

In many cases I do not understand everything either.

Ask ChatGPT

Many technical documents on the web rely on very specific commands from Linux, Windows, Powershell, PHP, and other technologies. Understanding these commands or their output is often difficult. Asking ChatGPT (or Bard, or a similar technology) for clarification is often a great help.

While there is no guarantee that the answer will be correct, in many cases the answer will be very useful (and indeed correct).

A prompt technique that often works well is this: "explain this:" followed by a copy-and-pasted command, or command output, or piece of code.

If you want instead to "learn" something, asking broad and general questions is not very useful (e.g. "how does access control work in Windows?"). It is usually much better to start general in order to delimit the overall scenario and then be very specific.

  • Start with something like "I want to understand Linux administration", or "I am a Windows user", "I am a Python programmer; I want to write a script that operates on Pandas dataframes", etc.
  • Then, make a very specific question. For example, "In Windows, how can I list all users of a given group from the command line?"

Relying on ChatGPT/Bard for having a quick, approximate understanding of what a command (or even a piece of code) actually does is a strategy used also by a top security company, Mandiant: see Analyzing an Alert for a PowerShell Script (there might be a conflict of interest, though, as Mandiant is part of Google and this post promotes the use of Bard, also a Google service).

I have occasionally provided a link to brief explanations provided by ChatGPT/Bard on specific topics, for ease of reading. As just pointed out, there is no guarantee that those explanations are correct: take them just as hints.